Chengdu: pandas, mahjong and the slowest city in China

Chengdu has a reputation to protect: the most unhurried city in China, and it works hard at it. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is why most people come, and it only really works early — pandas eat bamboo at dawn and are asleep flat on their backs by mid-morning, so the first hour after opening is when you see cubs actually falling out of trees. Red pandas trot along the handrails while you watch.

The rest of the day is deliberately slower. In Renmin Park you take a bamboo chair at the Heming teahouse, pay for a lidded cup of jasmine that gets refilled all afternoon, and let a man with a tuning fork clean your ears while retirees play mahjong and dance beside the lake. Wenshu Monastery keeps the same rhythm: incense smoke, ginkgo trees, a vegetarian canteen. Jinli and Kuanzhai Xiangzi are the rebuilt old lanes — touristy, but genuinely good for street food once it gets dark.

Then Sichuan wakes the whole thing up. Hotpot here is a communal cauldron of dried chilli and málà Sichuan pepper that leaves your lips buzzing for an hour; away from it, there is mapo tofu, dan dan noodles, sweet-water noodles, and the face-changing spectacle of a Sichuan opera show. Chengdu is also the doorway west: the 71-metre Leshan Giant Buddha, carved into a river cliff, and the misty temple staircases of Mount Emei are both day-trip distance, and the road onward climbs fast toward the Tibetan plateau. Spring and autumn are best — the basin's grey, humid summers are famously sunless.